Collectively, our findings suggest that information can be accumulated across fixations prior to explicit object recognition. Furthermore, the findings support the view that information selection in object recognition is carried out in a hypothesis testing manner (Deco & Schürman,
2000; Friston,
2003). Our results support recent findings on predictive coding (Friston,
2003) in object recognition (Summerfield, Egner, et al.
2006; Summerfield, Lepsien, Gitelman, Mesulam, & Nobre,
2006), suggesting that expectations guide attention in object recognition and visual search (see also Holm & Mäntylä
2007; Moores et al.,
2003). Importantly, predictive information sampling seems to precede explicit object recognition, suggesting that object recognition is a function of implicit inference (Helmholtz,
1910). Therefore, we look as if we know before we know.